Diane Bush with some of her nanna’s keepsakes which include newspaper clippings, family photos, numerous badges and a peep/view box resembling a tiny camera through which the viewer can see black and white landmarks of Melbourne to coincide with the 1956 Olympic Games. Photo: John Thistleton.
Diane Bush was only a year old when she and her 20-month-old sister Susan lost their mother and went to live with their grandparents.
Too little to understand the magnitude of what had happened, Diane adapted to her new life.
When her mother Wilma died, her father David Brown took his remaining two children to live with him at Vineyard in Sydney because he could not look after all four children.
“We (Diane and her sister Susan) were lucky; we got the best deal,” she said, reflecting on the love and care from her nanna and pop, Neta and Jack Thompson.
The Thompsons had to leave the home they had been building in Lagoon Street and moved to the greenkeeper’s residence at Tully Park Golf Club with their two little granddaughters.
Jack became the greenkeeper and Neta (short for Meneta) collected the members’ green fees. In those days Tully Park was an 18-hole course and had a licensed club, with the residence attached in Chantry Street next to North Park.
Neta was an avid collector, knitter, sewer and so gifted at craft she could make everything from the girls’ clothes to little outfits for their dolls.
Now retired, Diane has the time to unpack all her nanna’s keepsakes, including an assortment of more than 100 lapel badges from the 1940s and 1950s.
Pages from a Commonwealth Jubilee Year (1951) booklet, which has a decade of births, deaths and marriages in Goulburn and the basic wage from 1929 to 1950. The collection also has a booklet commemorating the first edition of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post on 6 October 1870. Photo: John Thistleton.
The badges are from fundraisers for Lilac City Festival queens, Goulburn High School fetes and the North Goulburn Primary School’s spring fair.
Other badges were issued by the Goulburn Motorcycle Club while others honour Australian Olympians and include numerous War Chest badges from World War I and II.
Neta’s parents worked at Kenmore as nurses and she had recounted once seeing Don Bradman playing cricket there.
Neta played cricket when Goulburn fielded two women’s teams and a representative side that played a touring English team in 1968-69. Her collection includes a book recording minutes of the Goulburn District Cricket Association from 1949 to 1959 which reveal her neat cursive writing.
“She was a lovely lady,” Diane said. “She was actually before her time; she was into craft. When we went to Batemans Bay, she would come home with all these big clam shells, make these dolls out of clam shells, like a bride doll.”
Goulburn’s premiership women’s A Grade cricket team, 1938-39. Neta is on the right-hand side, front row. Photo: Bush family collection.
Brides-to-be sought her out to make a small bride doll that was affixed to a car on their wedding day.
“She made all our clothes, she knitted,” Diane said. “She would buy what we call a teenage doll and dress it; from underpants to the shoes, she would make everything.”
Neta was a constant fundraiser for the Scouts and many others causes. Consequently the North Goulburn community embraced her granddaughters and supported them.
“Older kids would walk us to school; back in those days it was such a community effort to bring children up,” Diane said.
“We had lots of areas where we could play. I would be on the tractor with my pop,” she said. “They had the big shed where they kept all the sprays and chemicals and I would always be down there. We would take him morning tea,” she said.
Some of the badges made on behalf of Lilac City Festival queens in Goulburn. Photo: Diane Bush.
In later years Diane’s time on the course paid off, as she became Tully Park’s junior female champion. The junior male champion Brett Ogle won a swag of awards before turning pro and striking success internationally.
When Neta and Jack retired, they moved from Tully Park back to their home in Lagoon Street. She died when she was 79 and Diane was 26 and expecting her first daughter, Kate Meneta Bush.
